This article was originally featured in Cogitare’s 2023 Fall Edition.
Over the course of this past summer, I lived in California, Pennsylvania, and Japan—geographical shifts which slightly, yet inevitably, weakened my ties to my original home in California. As an artist, I experienced new landscapes—such as the vivid green of Japanese rice fields—for the first time. Meanwhile, while studying in Pennsylvania, my writer’s heart also travelled, to remain pretty securely in what my mind’s eye perceives as the literary land of Ireland-England. With my affections scattered to so many places across the globe, I sensed a loss of the rootedness which, unknown to me, had surrounded my life prior to this year. Since then I have wondered: how important is a deep personal connection with a specific locality for the artist? By examining the implications of the works of two fairly different writers, I will consider whether the artist—poet, painter, or musician—requires a single place to which he can anchor his life and work. Does a poet of place have an advantage over the wandering bard?
George Mackay Brown would answer in the affirmative, as shown in his 1973 novel Magnus. The novel follows an ancient community of earls, farmers, and tinkers dwelling on the Orkney Islands at the northernmost tip of Scotland, a setting which provides a strong sense of locality. Most of Brown’s characters are rooted in the mores and traditions of the Orkney setting. However, mercenary horsemen invade the islands; as antagonists of the story, they are always wandering from place to place, raiding and uprooting as they go. On the other hand, Brown imbues the native villagers with a deep respect for the land. He writes in the book’s opening: “The peasants put their slow patient scars on the fields.” Language like this binds the land and the characters together. A subsequent scene shows a couple of peasants discovering a stone-lined grave in the soil of their farmland. Rather than removing the stones, they respectfully cover it and plough around the chamber. The first portion of the book concludes with the composition of a poet-harpist, whose verses affirm and celebrate the ordered environment of Orkney:
“No, but all my body is struck and blown through, it is possessed with hierarchies and orders of very sweet sound.
That is the music of pax borealis: the king, the two earls, the bishop, landowners, merchants, priests, peasants, beggars, beasts, furrows, fish, stones.”
Even the beasts, fish, and stones are woven into the harpist’s song. For Brown, developing deep roots within a place and a community provides a necessary, stabilizing order for the individual’s life—an order that yields beauty.
On the other hand, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom House presents an artist whose connection to land sours his creative mind. Hawthorne’s narrator describes the town of Salem, the longtime home of his family for many generations, and comments dryly: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.” Though the narrator acknowledges the instinctual bond between a person and his place, he suggests that a prolonged bond can foster stagnancy, preventing personal growth. Due to this and other factors, the narrator’s life in Salem robs him of his imaginative powers as he struggles to write a novel. Eventually, he leaves Salem, for it lacks “the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires.” Living in one place for a long time, particularly in an atmosphere as uncongenial to art as Salem, dulls the imagination and the intellect. Because it is his family’s home, Hawthorne still possesses a deep bond with this land, but he feels free to break the bond for the sake of creative variety, freedom, and freshness.
Admittedly, Brown’s Orkney—sparse, albeit poetic—seems more compatible with art than the faded industrial austerity of Hawthorne’s Salem. Yet Hawthorne grants that as a writer, he failed to “diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of [Salem’s]
to-day…to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters.” With more effort and insight, Hawthorne might have found beauty in Salem, despite its mundanity. Furthermore, the tragedy that occurs at Orkney—through bloody events decidedly antithetical to art—may have intimidated a different artist. Yet Brown still finds “true and indestructible value” by using his tale to transcend the violence.
Perhaps different artists require different geographical shifts, at various times, for their art to flourish. But after examining Hawthorne and Brown together, it seems our duty is to look long and hard for beauty, wherever we are. As Christians embark on this search, we remember our true home: God Himself, the Person from whom all order and beauty come. An artist concerned with place will benefit from—to borrow Brown’s phrase—the “very sweet sound” of the poetry of the psalmist:
One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
and to inquire in his temple. (Psalm 27:4)
If an artist would form a deep personal connection with a specific locality, then he must first form one with God, our Home.
